Twenty-two years ago I was on my hon­ey­moon, whale watch­ing off the coast of Maine, obliv­i­ous to the world. My wife and I had stopped in a cute lit­tle mar­ket when a few snip­pets of words broke through my con­scious­ness from the radio play­ing in the back­ground. I first noticed the hushed solem­ni­ty of the NPR hosts, then dis­joint­ed words: plane, crashed, tow­ers.

Like every­one, we quick­ly pieced togeth­er the hor­ror hap­pen­ing in real time: sec­ond plane, jumpers, col­lapsed. I was pub­lish­ing Non​vi​o​lence​.org then, a peace por­tal, and felt I had to say some­thing, any­thing, so I rushed to the pub­lic com­put­er at the local library. There was a queue of wor­ried patrons want­i­ng to mes­sage loved ones. In a few moments I typed out some rushed words:

Today’s ter­ror­ist attacks are sim­ply hor­ren­dous, thou­sands of inno­cents might well lose their lives. Most impor­tant now is to sit patient­ly, to pray and to not call for mas­sive indis­crim­i­nant attacks that might only kill thou­sands more. Our char­ac­ter as a nation is being test­ed now. We must pray and heal and not respond in a hatred that will only fuel the cycle of war, glob­al injustice

We know how that turned out. Three thou­sand dead in New York and West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, fol­lowed by hun­dreds of thou­sands in West­ern Asia. Decades of wars in Afghanistan. A sec­ond war in Iraq prompt­ed by the flim­si­est and most unlike­ly of excus­es. Today, after all the blood, those coun­tries are hos­tile and unsta­ble. Yet two of the coun­tries co-responsible were U.S. allies, are still U.S. allies. The 9/11 attacks was planned and large­ly exe­cut­ed by Saud­is; Osama bin Laden was final­ly found liv­ing out in the open in Pak­istan in an upper class com­pound a short walk from the gates of the coun­try’s mil­i­tary acad­e­my. I’m glad we did­n’t invade Sau­di Ara­bia and Pak­istan but it makes one won­der what the oth­er wars were meant to accomplish.

This week many peo­ple are gath­er­ing to remem­ber 9/11, as they should. It was a hor­rif­ic attack. It struck our sense of safe­ty and fueled night­mares and tears. But when do we as U.S. cit­i­zens gath­er to think about how we react­ed? When do we remem­ber hun­dreds of thou­sands who have died since 9/11 in the name of ret­ri­bu­tion and a fear­ful revenge we’ve called free­dom?